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Nvidia CEO "Not Afraid" of CPU-GPU Hybrids
J. Dzhugashvili writes "Is Nvidia worried about the advent of both CPUs with graphics processor cores and Larrabee, Intel's future discrete graphics processor? Judging by the tone adopted by Nvidia's CEO during a financial analyst conference yesterday, not quite. Huang believes CPU-GPU hybrids will be no different (and just as slow) as today's integrated graphics chipsets, and he thinks people will still pay for faster Nvidia GPUs. Regarding Larrabee, Huang says Nvidia is going to 'open a can of whoop-ass' on Intel, and that Intel's strategy of reinventing the wheel by ignoring years of graphics architecture R&D is fundamentally flawed. Nvidia also has some new hotness in the pipeline, such as its APX 2500 system-on-a-chip for handhelds and a new platform for VIA processors."
No competition? What? Did ATI die or something?
Yes I know they got bought by AMD, but they still exist and they still make GPUs AFAIK.
And if your argument is that nVidia is better than ATI, let me remind you that ATI/nVidia and intel/AMD keep leapfrogging each other every few years.
IMHO, Nvidia is stuck as the odd-man out. When integrated chipsets and GPU-CPU hybrids can easily handle full-HD playback, the market for discrete GPUs falls and falls some more. Sure, discrete will always be faster, just like a Porsche is faster than a Toyota, but who makes more money (by a mile)?
Is Creative still around? Last I heard, they were making MP3 players...
If I understand them right, they're claiming that integrated graphics and CPU/GPU hybrids are just a toy, and that you want discrete graphics if you're serious. Ken Olsen famously said that "the PC is just a toy". When did you last use a "real" computer?
> ATI/AMD hasn't been competitive with NVIDIA for two product cycles
Competitive enough anyway. Long as I'm still on AGP, I'm still getting ATI cards (nVidia's agp offerings have classically been highly crippled beyond just running on AGP). But sure, I'm a niche, and truth be told, my next system will probably have nVidia.
But gamer video cards aren't everything, and I daresay not even the majority. If you have a flatscreen TV, chances are good it's got ATI parts in it. Then there's laptops and integrated video, nothing to sneeze at.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Perhaps the limitation is in the ability of the humans to model the scene rather than the ability of the computer to render it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Parent +1 Insightful.
The reason we can so easily tell the difference between CGI creatures and real creatures is not the photorealism of it, but the animation. Evaluate a screen cap of Lord of the Rings with Gollum in it, and then evaluate that entire scene in motion. The screen cap will look astonishingly realistic compared to the video.
Computers are catching up to the computational challenges of rendering scenes, but humans haven't quite yet figured out how to program every muscle movement living creatures make. Attempts for complete realism in 3D animation still fall somewhere in the Uncanny Valley.
The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
I haven't, but I have heard of Carmack, and Carmack "seems to think that Intel's direction using traditional ray tracing methods is not going to work." I didn't understand anything in that article, but assuming that the blurb was correct (and Carmack didn't seem to refute it in the 3 times he replied to that story), then I'd say that they may not be "less and less interested" but maybe they are "less and less right about the direction to take." Take your pick.
And while my little blurb may have been fundamentally incorrect, while I haven't heard anyone say they were looking forward to the new Radeon, I have heard even less people were looking forward to the new Intel graphical chipset. Have you?
Splitting hairs on this seems kinda useless. nVidia is really it right now in the graphics world, at least as far as the public is concerned, and I don't see that changing in the near future.